Former prosecutor offers a terrifying explanation for why he helped convict an innocent man

Glenn Ford leaving the maximum-security Angola prison in Louisiana.WAFB-TV 9 via The GuardianIn 1984, Glenn Ford was sentenced to death for the murder of a Shreveport, Louisiana, jeweler after an all-white jury convicted him. Thirty years later, evidence emerged that proved he wasn't the killer.

While the victim's family thanked Stroud profusely for Ford's conviction and death sentence, "facts are stubborn things," Stroud wrote. "They do not go away."

These facts — which finally freed Ford, Louisiana's longest-serving death row inmate — included information about the murder weapon that implicated the true perpetrator.

At the time Ford was tried, evidence pointing to his innocence existed. Stroud acknowledges he just didn't look hard enough. He overlooked the potential bias of an all-white jury. He even put a forensic pathologist, speaking "pure junk science" as Stroud now characterizes it, on the strand to prove that the killer had to be left-handed like Ford.

One of the star witnesses for the prosecution was also the girlfriend of a man previously suspected of the crime. After Ford's exoneration, she acknowledged she "lied about it all" in her testimony, quoted by The Guardian.

"I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic, and very full of myself," Stroud wrote. "I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning. To borrow a phrase from Al Pacino in the movie 'And Justice for All,' 'Winning became everything.'"

Ford, 64, spent nearly 26 years on death row. (AP Photo/WAFB-TV 9) In the article, Stroud apologizes to Ford, Ford's family, the jury, and the court for his lack of diligence. But he also spoke out against what he felt was an even larger stain of America's justice system: the death penalty.

Stroud now says that as a cocky 33-year-old prosecutor he wasn't capable of deciding whether someone lived or died — and he feels no one else can do the same "fairly and impartially." He writes:

The clear reality is that the death penalty is an anathema to any society that purports to call itself civilized. It is an abomination that continues to scar the fibers of this society and it will continue to do so until this barbaric penalty is outlawed. Until then, we will live in a land that condones state assisted revenge and that is not justice in any form or fashion.

Aside from Stroud's mistakes, many experts like federal judge Jed Rakoff already worry that prosecutors have too much power. They can decide when to brings charges, what charges to bring, and whether a defendant will have the opportunity to take a plea bargain.